Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan for a city-owned grocery market in East Harlem’s La Marqueta has a deeper problem than the absurdity of spending $30 million to launch a mere 9,000-square-foot store that won’t open until 2029.
His claim that the neighborhood lacks cheaper food than the citywide average — the whole basis for dipping into tax revenue at everyone else’s expense — is 100% baloney.
If he took time off from grinning at gullible journalists, he’d find the blocks around the planned grocery site under the MetroNorth Park Avenue trestle at East 116th Street are already chock-full of bodegas and larger stores where prices for basics such as eggs, milk and soda are not only lower than at Gristedes, Morton Williams and Trader Joe’s – they’re far below.
Mamdani, who declined to say how much a cucumber at his brainstorm might cost, claimed at a press conference, “When New Yorkers come to city-run grocery stores, they will see a clear price differential” for staples such as bread and eggs.
But the “clear price differential” already exists in the proposed market’s front- and backyards.
Despite woke claims that merchants gouge lower-income residents, prices at the spacious, 24-hour, well-stocked City Fresh Market at 125 E. 116th St. — a half-block from Mamdani’s site, one of 15 in the chain in the city and New Jersey — were comfortably below what we found in more prosperous neighborhoods.
Milk cost $1.99 a quart, compared with $2.29 at Gristedes. A 48-oz. jug of Trop Lite orange beverage was $5.29, compared with $5.49 at Morton Williams and $7.99 at Gristedes.
City Fresh Market sells 2-liter bottles of Coca-Cola, Sprite and other popular brands at two bottles for $6; they were more than $4 each at just about every other supermarket we checked.
And those eggs Mamdani mentioned? Grade-A Sunshine Farms medium eggs were available for just $5 for two dozen at City Fresh Market, versus nearly as much for a single dozen elsewhere.
Like other nearby merchants, City Fresh Market manager Manuel Betamcef feared the impact of the city grocery store on his establishment’s profitability. He said the plan was “very very, bad, not fair. It’s definitely going to affect us. We can’t go lower [to compete with it] because we have to pay rent and taxes.”
The question, though, might not be whether established stores can compete with Mamdani’s folly — but whether the city can compete with them.
For example, prices at Meat Market at 87 E. 116th St. between Park and Madison avenues were remarkably reasonable, even for East Harlem. The neighborhood’s median household income of $46,950 in 2023 was around 41% less than the citywide median, according to the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.
Meat Market offers 17 variety “plans” starting at a mere $41.99 for 10 pounds of meat — two pounds each of chicken cutlets, chicken legs, beef ribs, chuck steak and ground beef. Like all of the butcher shop’s meat plans, it came with a bonus — in this case, a bottle of soda.
Plan No. 6 includes 20 pounds of beef, chicken and pork for all of $73 — and comes with a bonus of a dozen eggs.
Yet, the “democratic socialist” mayor’s echo chamber includes Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who harrumphed, “In East Harlem, we see the health consequences of limited access every day — from higher rates of diabetes to heart disease — and the selection of La Marqueta builds on its historic role as a vital neighborhood food hub.”
He didn’t mention that the once-thriving La Marqueta turned into a flop over the past few decades when better food products became more widely available.
Local resident Destiny Louissant told Gothamist she didn’t see the point of a city-run food market when “there’s literally one up the block, there’s a lot in the area.”
And food economist Stephen Zagor, an adjunct associate professor at Columbia Business School, told The Post that while Mamdani’s plan was “a noble idea to help solve food insecurity, it seems to have more holes than a slice of subsidized Swiss cheese.”
He added, “The fact that Mandani’s team chose a first location within an apple throw of numerous existing neighborly-priced supermarkets makes me even more concerned that we may be seeing the birth of a food Titanic — costly to open and operationally unsound.”
